There are some interesting end credits to be found in Terry Gilliam's fantasy "The Brothers Grimm," which opens Friday, more than two years after it began production in Prague. Coming in first place in the category of "star with the biggest entourage" is Matt Damon, who plays Will Grimm.

Standing in the midst of pre-production hell for his dream film, "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," filmmaker Terry Gilliam looked around and summed it up. "There is," he said, an actual gleam in his eye, "a lot of potential for chaos here." "Lost in La Mancha," the essential new documentary about the collapse of Gilliam's most cherished project, records that chaos and more.

Terry Gilliam, the maverick director responsible for such off-center films as "Time Bandits," "12 Monkeys" and "Brazil," met his match when he tackled Cervantes' Don Quixote. His 10-year battle to bring the character to the screen became an obsession -- one he was forced to suspend when his $32-million production had the plug pulled by the insurance company in October 2000 after just six days of shooting. Chronicling the film's decline and fall were documentarians Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, brought in to track the evolution of the project.

There was a certain inevitable logic that Terry Gilliam would attempt to make a film based on Cervantes' 17th century novel "Don Quixote." He is, after all, one of the most quixotic of directors. Visionary, impulsive and unpredictable, Gilliam, 61, is a man who chooses to dream the impossible dream.

The studio haggled over budget. The star stormed off the set and locked himself in his trailer. And that was just on the documentary that chronicles Terry Gilliam's tense production of "12 Monkeys," the surprise 1995 box-office hit starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt.

When an intriguing movie preview is perilously confusing, hope springs eternal that it will all become clear in the full-length version. Especially when the star of the preview seems to be Brad Pitt. But for most kids, it just didn't happen in director Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys." First, the story switches back and forth between 1996 and 20 or 30 years hence, when survivors of the disaster have been forced to live underground. Loose ends dangle throughout: Who are the bad guys?

January 7, 1996 | Jack Mathews, Jack Mathews is film critic for Newsday. He is the author of "The Battle of Brazil," a book about the controversy over the film

Irony is one ingredient never in short supply in Hollywood, where alliances and friendships are forged, broken and repaired according to the next project and next potential fortune. But there have been few ironies in recent years quite as rich as the current honeymoon between former Monty Python illustrator Terry Gilliam and MCA's Universal Pictures.

"12 Monkeys" director Terry Gilliam will hold a live online chat at 6 p.m. on Jan. 4. The chat will be carried simultaneously on Microsoft Network's the Cinemania Connection, on Compuserve's Entertainment Drive and on the Internet via Universal's World Wide Web site for "12 Monkeys." The chat is the interactive debut for Gilliam, who was a founder of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

June 4, 1995 | John Anderson, John Anderson is a staff writer for Newsday. and

On a chilly, darkened movie set that's been decorated to look like Earth's last Christmas, a figure lumbers in, festooned with clamps, canisters, hoses, gauges, bulbs, straps and wires. Both actor and hardware are enclosed in plastic. The plastic is inflated. "The boy in the bubble," someone announces. "The human condom," someone adds. Bruce Willis is ready for his close-up. The time? AD 2035. The character? A prisoner sent from the subterranean lair of humankind's last surviving few. The task?